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Title: Politics vs. Literature
Author: George Orwell
Date: 1946
Language: en
Topics: book review, literature
Source: Retrieved on 18th December 2021 from https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/swift/english/e_swift

George Orwell

Politics vs. Literature

In Gulliver’s Travels humanity is attacked, or criticized, from at least

three different angles, and the implied character of Gulliver himself

necessarily changes somewhat in the process. In Part I he is the typical

eighteenth-century voyager, bold, practical and unromantic, his homely

outlook skilfully impressed on the reader by the biographical details at

the beginning, by his age (he is a man of forty, with two children, when

his adventures start), and by the inventory of the things in his

pockets, especially his spectacles, which make several appearances. In

Part II he has in general the same character, but at moments when the

story demands it he has a tendency to develop into an imbecile who is

capable of boasting of ‘our noble Country, the Mistress of Arts and

Arms, the Scourge of France’, etc., etc., and at the same time of

betraying every available scandalous fact about the country which he

professes to love. In Part III he is much as he was in Part I, though,

as he is consorting chiefly with courtiers and men of learning, one has

the impression that he has risen in the social scale. In Part IV he

conceives a horror of the human race which is not apparent, or only

intermittently apparent, in the earlier books, and changes into a sort

of unreligious anchorite whose one desire is to live in some desolate

spot where he can devote himself to meditating on the goodness

oftheHouyhnhnms. However, these inconsistencies are forced upon Swift by

the fact that Gulliver is there chiefly to provide a contrast. It is

necessary, for instance, that he should appear sensible in Part I and at

least intermittently silly in Part II because in both books the

essential manoeuvre is the same, i.e. to make the human being look

ridiculous by imagining him as a creature six inches high. Whenever

Gulliver is not acting as a stooge there is a sort of continuity in his

character, which comes out especially in his resourcefulness and his

observation of physical detail. He is much the same kind of person, with

the same prose style, when he bears off the warships of Blefuscu, when

he rips open the belly of the monstrous rat, and when he sails away upon

the ocean in his frail coracle made from. the skins of Yahoos. Moreover,

it is difficult not to feel that in his shrewder moments Gulliver is

simply Swift himself, and there is at least one incident in which Swift

seems to be venting his private grievance against contemporary Society.

It will be remembered that when the Emperor of Lilliput’s palace catches

fire, Gulliver puts it out by urinating on it. Instead of being

congratulated on his presence of mind, he finds that he has committed a

capital offence by making water in the precincts of the palace, and

I was privately assured, that the Empress, conceiving the greatest

Abhorrence of what I had done, removed to the most distant Side of the

Court, firmly resolved that those buildings should never be repaired for

her Use; and, in the Presence of her chief Confidents, could not forbear

vowing Revenge.

According to Professor G. M. Trevelyan (England under Queen Anne), part

of the reason for Swift’s failure to get preferment was that the Queen

was scandalized by the Tale of a Tub — a pamphlet in which Swift

probably felt that he had done a great service to the English Crown,

since it scarifies the Dissenters and still more the Catholics while

leaving the Established Church alone. In any case no one would deny that

Gulliver’s Travels is a rancorous as well as a pessimistic book, and

that especially in Parts I and III it often descends into political

partisanship of a narrow kind. Pettiness and magnanimity, republicanism

and authori-tarianism, love of reason and lack of curiosity, are all

mixed up in it. The hatred of the human body with which Swift is

especially associated is only dominant in Part IV, but somehow this new

preoccupation does not come as a surprise. One feels that all these

adventures, and all these changes of mood, could have happened to the

same person, and the inter-connexion between Swift’s political loyalties

and his ultimate despair is one of the most interesting features of the

book.

Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of

perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.

Part I of Gulliver’s Travels, ostensibly a satire on human greatness,

can be seen, if one looks a little deeper, to be simply an attack on

England, on the dominant Whig Party, and on the war with France, which —

however bad the motives of the Allies may have been — did save Europe

from being tyrannized over by a single reactionary power. Swift was not

a Jacobite nor strictly speaking a Tory, and his declared aim in the war

was merely a moderate peace treaty and not the outright defeat of

England. Nevertheless there is a tinge of quis-lingism in his attitude,

which comes out in the ending of Part I and slightly interferes with the

allegory. When Gulliver flees from Lilliput (England) to Blefuscu

(France) the assumption that a human being six inches high is inherently

contemptible seems to be dropped. Whereas the people of Lilliput have

behaved towards Gulliver with the utmost treachery and meanness, those

of Blefuscu behave generously and straightforwardly, and indeed this

section of the book ends on a different note from the all-round

disillusionment of the earlier chapters. Evidently Swift’s animus is, in

the first place, against England. It is ‘your Natives’ (i.e. Gulliver’s

fellow-countrymen) whom the King of Brob-dingnag considers to be ‘the

most pernicious Race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered

to crawl upon the surface of the Earth’, and the long passage at the

end, denouncing colonization and foreign conquest, is plainly aimed at

England, although the contrary is elaborately stated. The Dutch,

England’s allies and target of one of Swift’s most famous pamphlets, are

also more or less wantonly attacked in Part III. There is even what

sounds like a personal note in the passage in which Gulliver records his

satisfaction that the various countries he has discovered cannot be made

colonies of the British Crown:

The Houyhnhnms, indeed, appear not to be so well prepared for War, a

Science to which they are perfect Strangers, and especially against

missive Weapons. However, supposing myself to be a Minister of State, I

could never give my advice for invading them.... Imagine twenty thousand

of them breaking into the midst of an European army, confounding the

Ranks, overturning the Carriages, battering the Warriors’ Faces into

Mummy, by terrible Yerks from their hinder hoofs...

Considering that Swift does not waste words, that phrase, ‘battering the

warriors’ faces into mummy’, probably indicates a secret wish to see the

invincible armies of the Duke of Marlborough treated in a like manner.

There are similar touches elsewhere. Even the country mentioned in Part

III, where ‘the Bulk of the People consist, in a Manner, wholly of

Discoverers, Witnesses, Informers, Accusers, Prosecutors, Evidences,

Swearers, together with their several subservient and subaltern

Instruments, all under the Colours, the Conduct, and Pay of Ministers of

State’, is called Langdon, which is within one letter of being an

anagram of England. (As the early editions of the book contain

misprints, it may perhaps have been intended as a complete anagram.)

Swift’s physical repulsion from humanity is certainly real enough, but

one has the feeling that his debunking of human grandeur, his diatribes

against lords, politicians, court favourites, etc., has mainly a local

application and springs from the fact that he belonged to the

unsuccessful party. He denounces injustice and oppression, but he gives

no evidence of liking democracy. In spite of his enormously greater

powers, his implied position is very similar to that of the innumerable

silly-clever Conservatives of our own day — people like Sir Alan

Herbert, Professor G. M. Young, Lord Eiton, the Tory Reform Committee or

the long line of Catholic apologists from W. H. Mallock onwards: people

who specialize in cracking neat jokes at the expense of whatever is

‘modern’ and ‘progressive’, and whose opinions are often all the more

extreme because they know that they cannot influence the actual drift of

events. After all, such a pamphlet as An Argument to prove that the

Abolishing of Christianity, etc., is very like ‘Timothy Shy’ having a

bit of clean fun with the Brains Trust, or Father Ronald Knox exposing

the errors ofBertrand Russell. And the ease with which Swift has been

forgiven — and forgiven, sometimes, by devout believers — for the

blasphemies of A Tale of a Tub demonstrates clearly enough the

feebleness of religious sentiments as compared with political ones.

However, the reactionary cast of Swift’s mind does not show itself

chiefly in his political affiliations. The important thing is his

attitude towards Science, and, more broadly, towards intellectual

curiosity. The famous Academy of Lagado, described in Part III of

Gulliver’s Travels, is no doubt a justified satire on most of the

so-called scientists of Swift’s own day. Significantly, the people at

work in it are described as ‘Projectors’, that is, people not engaged in

disinterested research but merely on the look-out for gadgets which will

save labour and bring in money. But there is no sign — indeed, all

through the book there are many signs to the contrary — that ‘pure’

science would have struck Swift as a worth-while activity. The more

serious kind of scientist has already had a kick in the pants in Part

II, when the ‘Scholars’ patronized by the King of Brobdingnag try to

account for Gulliver’s small stature:

After much Debate, they concluded unanimously that I was only Relplum

Scalcath, which is interpreted literally, Lusus Naturae, a Determination

exactly agreeable to the modern philosophy of Europe, whose Professors,

disdaining the old Evasion of Occult Causes, whereby the followers of

Aristotle endeavoured in vain to disguise their Ignorance, have invented

this wonderful solution of All Difficulties, to the unspeakable

Advancement of human Knowledge.

If this stood by itself one might assume that Swift is merely the enemy

of sham science. In a number of places, however, he goes out of his way

to proclaim the uselessness of all learning or speculation not directed

towards some practical end:

The learning of (the Brobdingnaglans) is very defective, consisting only

in Morality, History, Poetry, and Mathematics, wherein they must be

allowed to excel. But, the last of these is wholly applied to what may

be useful in Life, to the improvement of Agriculture, and all mechanical

Arts so that among us it would be little esteemed. And as to Ideas,

Entities, Abstractions, and Transcen-dentals, I could never drive the

least Conception into their Heads.

The Houyhnhnms, Swift’s ideal beings, are backward even in a mechanical

sense. They are unacquainted with metals, have never heard of boats, do

not, properly speaking, practise agriculture (we are told that the oats

which they live upon ‘grow naturally’), and appear not to have invented

wheels[1]. They have no alphabet, and evidently have not much curiosity

about the physical world. They do not believe that any inhabited country

exists beside their own, and though they understand the motions of the

sun and moon, and the nature of eclipses, ‘this is the utmost progress

of their Astronomy’. By contrast, the philosophers of the flying island

of Laputa are so continuously absorbed in mathematical speculations that

before speaking to them one has to attract their attention by napping

them on the ear with a bladder. They have catalogued ten thousand fixed

stars, have settled the periods of ninety-three comets, and have

discovered, in advance of the astronomers of Europe, that Mars has two

moons — all of which information Swift evidently regards as ridiculous,

useless and uninteresting. As one might expect, he believes that the

scientist’s place, if he has a place, is in the laboratory, and that

scientific knowledge has no bearing on political matters:

What I... thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong Disposition I

observed in them towards News and Politics, perpetually enquiring into

Public Affairs, giving their judgements in Matters of State, and

passionately disputing every inch of a Party Opinion. I have, indeed,

observed the same Disposition among most of the Mathematicians I have

known in Europe, though I could never discover the least Analogy between

the two Sciences; unless those people suppose, that, because the

smallest Circle hath as many Degrees as the largest, therefore the

Regulation and Management of the World require no more Abilities, than

the Handling and Turning of a Globe.

Is there not something familiar in that phrase ‘I could never discover

the least analogy between the two sciences’? It has precisely the note

of the popular Catholic apologists who profess to be astonished when a

scientist utters an opinion on such questions as the existence of God or

the immortality of the soul. The scientist, we are told, is an expert

only in one restricted field: why should his opinions be of value in any

other? The implication is that theology is just as much an exact science

as, for instance, chemistry, and that the priest is also an expert whose

conclusions on certain subjects must be accepted. Swift in effect makes

the same claim for the politician, but he goes one better in that he

will not allow the scientist — either the ‘pure’ scientist or the ad hoc

investigator — to be a useful person in his own line. Even if he had not

written Part III of Gulliver’s Travels, one could infer from the rest of

the book that, like Tolstoy and like Blake, he hates the very idea of

studying the processes of Nature. The ‘Reason’ which he so admires in

the Houyhnhnms does not primarily mean the power of drawing logical

inferences from observed facts. Although he never defines it, it appears

in most contexts to mean either common sense — i.e. acceptance of the

obvious and contempt for quibbles and abstractions — or absence of

passion and superstition. In general he assumes that we know all that we

need to know already, and merely use our knowledge incorrectly.

Medicine, for instance, is a useless science, because if we lived in a

more natural way, there would be no diseases. Swift, however, is not a

simple-lifer or an admirer of the Noble Savage. He is in favour of

civilization and the arts of civilization. Not only does he see the

value of good manners, good conversation, and even learning of a

literary and historical kind, he also sees that agriculture, navigation

and architecture need to be studied and could with advantages be

improved. But his implied aim is a static, incurious civilization — the

world of his own day, a little cleaner, a little saner, with no radical

change and no poking into the unknowable. More than one would expect in

anyone so free from accepted fallacies, he reveres the past, especially

classical antiquity, and believes that modern man has degenerated

sharply during the past hundred years[2]. In the island of sorcerers,

where the spirits of the dead can be called up at will:

I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large

chamber, and a modern Representative in Counterview, in another. The

first seemed to be an Assembly of Heroes and Demy-Gods, the other a Knot

of Pedlars, Pick-pockets, Highwaymen and Bullies.

Although Swift uses this section of Part III to attack the truthfulness

of recorded history, his critical spirit deserts him as soon as he is

dealing with Greeks and Romans. He remarks, of course, upon the

corruption of imperial Rome, but he has an almost unreasoning admiration

for some of the leading figures of the ancient world:

I was struck with profound Veneration at the sight of Brutus, and could

easily discover the most consummate Virtue, the greatest Intrepidity and

Firmness of Mind, the truest Love of his Country, and general

Benevolence for Mankind, in every Lineament of his Countenance.... I had

the honour to have much Conversation with Brutus, and was told, that his

Ancestors Junws, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the younger, Sir Thomas

More, and himself, were perpetually together: a Sextumvirate, to which

all the Ages of the World cannot add a seventh.

It will be noticed that of these six people, only one is a Christian.

This is an important point. If one adds together Swift’s pessimism, his

reverence for the past, his incuriosity and his horror of the human

body, one arrives at an attitude common among religious reactionaries —

that is, people who defend an unjust order of Society by claiming that

this world cannot be substantially improved and only the ‘next world’

matters. However, Swift shows no sign of having any religious beliefs,

at least in any ordinary sense of the words. He does not appear to

believe seriously in life after death, and his idea of goodness is bound

up with republicanism, love of liberty, courage, ‘benevolence’ (meaning

in effect public spirit), ‘reason’ and other pagan qualities. This

reminds one that there is another strain in Swift, not quite congruous

with his disbelief in progress and his general hatred of humanity.

To begin with, he has moments when he is ‘constructive’ and even

‘advanced’. To be occasionally inconsistent is almost a mark of vitality

in Utopia books, and Swift sometimes inserts a word of praise into a

passage that ought to be purely satirical. Thus, his ideas about the

education of the young are fathered on to the Lilliputians, who have

much the same views on this subject as the Houyhnhnms. The Lilliputians

also have various social and legal institutions (for instance, there are

old age pensions, and people are rewarded for keeping the law as well as

punished for breaking it) which Swift would have liked to see prevailing

in his own country. In the middle of this passage Swift remembers his

satirical intention and adds, ‘In relating these and the following Laws,

I would only be understood to mean the original Institutions, and not

the most scandalous Corruptions into which these people are fallen by

the degenerate Nature of Man’: but as Lilliput is supposed to represent

England, and the laws he is speaking of have never had their parallel in

England, it is clear that the impulse to make constructive suggestions

has been too much for him. But Swift’s greatest contribution to

political thought in the narrower sense of the words, is his attack,

especially in Part III, on what would now be called totalitarianism. He

has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted ‘police

State’, with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials, all really

designed to neutralize popular discontent by changing it into war

hysteria. And one must remember that Swift is here inferring the whole

from a quite small part, for the feeble governments of his own day did

not give him illustrations ready-made. For example, there is the

professor at the School of Political Projectors who ‘shewed me a large

Paper of Instructions for discovering Plots and Conspiracies’, and who

claimed that one can find people’s secret thoughts by examining their

excrement:

Because Men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they

are at Stool, which he found by frequent Experiment: for in such

Conjunctures, when he used meerly as a trial to consider what was the

best Way of murdering the King, his Ordure would have a tincture of

Green; but quite different when he thought only of raising an

Insurrection, or burning the Metropolis.

The professor and his theory are said to have been suggested to Swift by

the — from our point of view — not particularly astonishing or

disgusting fact that in a recent State trial some letters found in

somebody’s privy had been put in evidence. Later in the same chapter we

seem to be positively in the middle of the Russian purges:

In the Kingdom of Tribnia, by the Natives called Langdon... the Bulk of

the People consist, in a Manner, wholly of Discoverers, Witnesses,

Informers, Accusers, Prosecutors, Evidences, Swearers.

... It is first agreed, and settled among them, what suspected Persons

shall be accused of a Plot: Then, effectual Care is taken to secure all

their Letters and Papers, and put the Owners in Chains. These papers are

delivered to a Sett of Artists, very dexterous in finding out the

mysterious Meanings of Words, Syllables, and Letters.... Where this

method fails, they have two others more effectual, which the Learned

among them call Acrostics and Anagrams. First, they can decypher all

initial Letters into political Meanings: Thus: N shall signify a Plot, B

a Regiment of Horse, L a Fleet at Sea: Or, Secondly, by transposing the

Letters of the Alphabet in any suspected Paper, they can lay open the

deepest Designs of a discontented Party. So, for Example if I should say

in a Letter to a Friend, Our Brother Tom has just got the Piles, a

skilful Decypherer would discover that the same Letters, which compose

that Sentence, may be analysed in the following Words: Resist — a Plot

is brought Home — The Tour[3] And this is the anagrammatic method.

Other professors at the same school invent simplified languages, write

books by machinery, educate their pupils by inscribing the lesson on a

wafer and causing them to swallow it, or propose to abolish

individuality altogether by cutting off part of the brain of one man and

grafting it on to the head of another. There is something queerly

familiar in the atmosphere of these chapters, because, mixed up with

much fooling, there is a perception that one of the aims of

totalitarianism is not merely to make sure that people will think the

right thoughts, but actually to make them less conscious. Then, again,

Swift’s account of the Leader who is usually to be found ruling over a

tribe of Yahoos, and of the ‘favourite’ who acts first as a dirty-worker

and later as a scapegoat, fits remarkably well into the pattern of our

own times. But are we to infer from all this that Swift was first and

foremost an enemy of tyranny and a champion of the free intelligence?

No: his own views, so far as one can discern them, are not markedly

liberal. No doubt he hates lords, kings, bishops, generals, ladies of

fashion, orders, titles and flummery generally, but he does not seem to

o think better of the common people than of their rulers, or to be in

favour of increased social equality, or to be enthusiastic about

representative institutions. The Houyhnhnms are organized upon a sort of

caste system which is racial in character, the horses which do the

menial work being of different colours from their masters and not

interbreeding with them. The educational system which Swift admires in

the Lilliputians takes hereditary class distinctions for granted, and

the children of the poorest classes do not go to school, because ‘their

Business being only to till and cultivate the Earth... therefore their

Education is of little Consequence to the Public’. Nor does he seem to

have been strongly in favour of freedom of speech and the Press, in

spite of the toleration which his own writings enjoyed. The King of

Brobdingnag is astonished at the multiplicity of religious and political

sects in England, and considers that those who hold ‘opinions

prejudicial to the public’ (in the context this seems to mean simply

heretical opinions), though they need not be obliged to change them,

ought to be obliged to conceal them: for ‘as it was Tyranny in any

Government to require the first, so it was weakness not to enforce the

second’. There is a subtler indication of Swift’s own attitude in the

manner in which Gulliver leaves the land of the Houyhnhnms.

Intermittently, at least. Swift was a kind of anarchist, and Part IV of

Gulliver’s Travels is a picture of an anarchistic Society, not governed

by law in the ordinary sense, but by the dictates of ‘Reason’, which arc

voluntarily accepted by everyone. The General Assembly of the Houyhnhnms

‘exhorts’ Gulliver’s master to get rid of him, and his neighbours put

pressure on him to make him comply. Two reasons are given. One is that

the presence of this unusual Yahoo may unsettle the rest of the tribe,

and the other is that a friendly relationship between a Houyhnhnm and a

Yahoo is ‘not agreeable to Reason or Nature, or a Thing ever heard of

before among them’. Gulliver’s master is somewhat unwilling to obey, but

the ‘exhortation’ (a Houyhnhnm, we are told, is never compelled to do

anything, he is merely ‘exhorted’ or ‘advised’) cannot be disregarded.

This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is explicit

in the anarchist or pacifist vision of Society. In a Society in which

there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of

behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the

tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant

than any system of law. When human beings are governed by ‘thou shalt

not’, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when

they are supposedly governed by ‘love’ or ‘reason’, he is under

continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way

as everyone else. The Houyhnhnms, we are told, were unanimous on almost

all subjects. The only question they ever discussed was how to deal with

the Yahoos. Otherwise there was no room for disagreement among them,

because the truth is always either self-evident, or else it is

undis-coverable and unimportant. They had apparently no word for

‘opinion’ in their language, and in their conversations there was no

‘difference of sentiments’. They had reached, in fact, the highest stage

of totalitarian organization, the stage when conformity has become so

general that there is no need for a police force. Swift approves of this

kind of thing because among his many gifts neither curiosity nor

good-nature was included. Disagreement would always seem to him sheer

perversity. ‘Reason,’ among the Houyhn-hnms, he says, ‘is not a Point

Problematical, as with us, where men can argue with Plausibility on both

Sides of a Question; but strikes you with immediate Conviction; as it

must needs do, where it is not mingled, obscured, or discoloured by

Passion and Interest.’ In other words, we know everything already, so

why should dissident opinions be tolerated? The totalitarian Society of

the Houyhnhnms, where there can be no freedom and no development,

follows naturally from this.

We are right to think of Swift as a rebel and iconoclast, but except in

certain secondary matters, such as his insistence that women should

receive the same education as men, he cannot be labelled ‘Left’. He is a

Tory anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty, and

preserving the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the

existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible. When Swift utters

one of his characteristic diatribes against the rich and powerful, one

must probably, as I said earlier, write off something for the fact that

he himself belonged to the less successful party, and was personally

disappointed. The ‘outs’, for obvious reasons, are always more radical

than the ‘ins’[4]. But the most essential thing in Swift is his

inability to believe that life — ordinary life on the solid earth, and

not some rationalized, deodorized version of it — could be made worth

living. Of course, no honest person claims that happiness is now a

normal condition among adult human beings; but perhaps it could be made

normal, and it is upon this question that all serious political

controversy really turns. Swift has much in common — more, I believe,

than has been noticed — with Tolstoy, another disbeliever in the

possibility of happiness. In both men you have the same anarchistic

outlook covering an authoritarian cast of mind; in both a similar

hostility to Science, the same impatience with opponents, the same

inability to see the importance of any question not interesting to

themselves ; and in both cases a sort of horror of the actual process of

life, though in Tolstoy’s case it was arrived at later and in a

different way. The sexual unhappiness of the two men was not of the same

kind, but there was this in common, that in both of them a sincere

loathing was mixed up with a morbid fascination. Tolstoy was a reformed

rake who ended by preaching complete celibacy, while continuing to

practise the opposite into extreme old age. Swift was presumably

impotent, and had an exaggerated horror of human dung: he also thought

about it incessantly, as is evident throughout his works. Such people

are not likely to enjoy even the small amount of happiness that falls to

most human beings, and, from obvious motives, are not likely to admit

that earthly life is capable of much improvement. Their incuriosity, and

hence their intolerance, spring from the same root.

Swift’s disgust, rancour and pessimism would make sense against the

background of a ‘next world’ to which this one is the prelude. As he

does not appear to believe seriously in any such thing, it becomes

necessary to construct a paradise supposedly existing on the surface of

the earth, but something quite different from anything we know, with all

that he disapproves of — lies, folly, change, enthusiasm, pleasure, love

and dirt — eliminated from it. As his ideal being he chooses the horse,

an animal whose excrement is not offensive. The Houyhnhnms are dreary

beasts — this is so generally admitted that the point is not worth

labouring. Swift’s genius can make them credible, but there can have

been very few readers in whom they have excited any feeling beyond

dislike. And this is not from wounded vanity at seeing animals preferred

to men; for, of the two, the Houyhnhnms are much liker to human beings

than are the Yahoos, and Gulliver’s horror of the Yahoos, together with

his recognition that they are the same kind of creature as himself,

contains a logical absurdity. This horror comes upon him at his very

first sight of them. ‘I never beheld,’ he says, ‘in all my Travels, so

disagreeable an Animal, nor one against which I naturally conceived so

strong an Antipathy.’ But in comparison with what are the Yahoos

disgusting? Not with the Houyhnhnms, because at this time Gulliver has

not seen a Houyhnhnm. It can only be in comparison with himself, i.e.

with a human being. Later, however, we are to be told that the Yahoos

are human beings, and human society becomes insupportable to Gulliver

because all men are Yahoos. In that case why did he not conceive his

disgust of humanity earlier? In effect we are told that the Yahoos are

fantastically different from men, and yet are the same. Swift has

over-reached himself in his fury, and is shouting at his

fellow-creatures, ‘You are filthier than you are!’ However, it is

impossible to feel much sympathy with the Yahoos, and it is not because

they oppress the Yahoos that the Houyhnhnms are unattractive. They are

unattractive because the ‘Reason’ by which they are governed is really a

desire for death. They are exempt from love, friendship, curiosity,

fear, sorrow and — except in their feelings towards the Yahoos, who

occupy rather the same place in their community as the Jews in Nazi

Germany — anger and hatred. ‘They have no Fondness for their Colts or

Foles, but the Care they take, in educating them, proceeds entirely from

the Dictates of Reason.’ They lay store by ‘Friendship’ and

‘Benevolence’, but ‘these are not confined to particular Objects, but

universal to the whole Race’. They also value conversation, but in their

conversations there are no differences of opinion, and ‘nothing passed

but what was useful, expressed in the fewest and most significant

Words’. They practise strict birth control, each couple producing two

offspring and thereafter abstaining from sexual intercourse. Their

marriages are arranged for them by their elders, on eugenic principles,

and their language contains no word for ‘love’, in the sexual sense.

When somebody dies they carry on exactly as before, without feeling any

grief. It will be seen that their aim is to be as like a corpse as is

possible while retaining physical life. One or two of their

characteristics, it is true, do not seem to be strictly ‘reasonable’ in

their own usage of the word. Thus, they place a great value not only on

physical hardihood but on athleticism, and they are devoted to poetry.

But these exceptions may be less arbitrary than they seem. Swift

probably emphasizes the physical strength of the Houyhnhnms in order to

make clear that they could never be conquered by the hated human race,

while a taste for poetry may figure among their qualities because poetry

appeared to Swift as the antithesis of Science, from his point of view

the most useless of all pursuits. In Part III he names ‘Imagination,

Fancy, and Invention’ as desirable faculties in which the Laputan

mathematicians (in spite of their love of music) were wholly lacking.

One must remember that although Swift was an admirable writer of comic

verse, the kind of poetry he thought valuable would probably be didactic

poetry. The poetry of the Houyhnhnms, he says —

must be allowed to excel (that of) all other Mortals; wherein the

Justness of their Similes, and the Minuteness, as well as exactness, of

their Descriptions, are, indeed, inimitable. Their Verses abound very

much in both of these; and usually contain either some exalted Notions

of Friendship and Benevolence, or the Praises of those who were Victors

in Races, and other bodily Exercises.

Alas, not even the genius of Swift was equal to producing a specimen by

which we could judge the poetry of the Houyhnhnms. But it sounds as

though it were chilly stuff (in heroic couplets, presumably), and not

seriously in conflict with the principles of ‘Reason’.

Happiness is notoriously difficult to describe, and pictures of a just

and well-ordered Society are seldom either attractive or convincing.

Most creators of ‘favourable’ Utopias, however, are concerned to show

what life could be like if it were lived more fully. Swift advocates a

simple refusal of life, justifying this by the claim that ‘Reason’

consists in thwarting your instincts. The Houyhnhnms, creatures without

a history, continue for generation after generation to live prudently,

maintaining their population at exactly the same level, avoiding all

passion, suffering from no diseases, meeting death indifferently,

training up their young in the same principles — and all for what? In

order that the same process may continue indefinitely. The notions that

life here and now is worth living, or that it could be made worth

living, or that it must be sacrificed for some future good, are all

absent. The dreary world of the Houyhnhnms was about as good a Utopia as

Swift could construct, granting that he neither believed in a ‘next

world’ nor could get any pleasure out of certain normal activities. But

it is not really set up as something desirable in itself, but as the

justification for another attack on humanity. The aim, as usual, is to

humiliate Man by reminding him that he is weak and ridiculous, and above

all that he stinks; and the ultimate motive, probably, is a kind of

envy, the envy of the ghost for the living, of the man who knows he

cannot be happy for the others who — so he fears -may be a little

happier than himself. The political expression of such an outlook must

be either reactionary or nihilistic, because the person who holds it

will want to prevent Society from developing in some direction in which

his pessimism may be cheated. One can do this either by blowing

everything to pieces, or by averting social change. Swift ultimately

blew everything to pieces in the only way that was feasible before the

atomic bomb — that is, he went mad — but, as I have tried to show, his

political aims were on the whole reactionary ones.

From what I have written it may have seemed that I am against Swift, and

that my object is to refute him and even to belittle him. In a political

and moral sense I am against him, so far as I understand him. Yet

curiously enough he is one of the writers I admire with least reserve,

and Gulliver’s Travels, in particular, is a book which it seems

impossible for me to grow tired of. I read it first when I was, eight —

one day short of eight, to be exact, for I stole and furtively read the

copy which was to be given me next day on my eighth birthday — and I

have certainly not read it less than half a dozen times since. Its

fascination seems inexhaustible. If I had to make a list of six books

which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would

certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them. This raises the question:

what is the relationship between agreement with a writer’s opinions, and

enjoyment of his work?

If one is capable of intellectual detachment, one can perceive merit in

a writer whom one deeply disagrees with, but enjoyment is a different

matter. Supposing that there is such a thing as good or bad art, then

the goodness or badness must reside in the work of art itself- not

independently of the observer, indeed, but independently of the mood of

the observer. In one sense, therefore, it cannot be true that a poem is

good on Monday and bad on Tuesday. But if one judges the poem by the

appreciation it arouses, then it can certainly be true, because

appreciation, or enjoyment, is a subjective condition which cannot be

commanded. For a great deal of his waking life, even the most cultivated

person has no aesthetic feelings whatever, and the power to have

aesthetic feelings is very easily destroyed. When you are frightened, or

hungry, or are suffering from toothache or sea-sickness, King Lear is no

better from your point of view than Peter Pan. You may know in an

intellectual sense that it is better, but that is simply a fact which

you remember: you will not feel the merit of King Lear until you are

normal again. And aesthetic judgement can be upset just as disastrously

— more disastrously, because the cause is less readily recognized — by

political or moral disagreement. If a book angers, wounds or alarms you,

then you will not enjoy it, whatever its merits may be. If it seems to

you a really pernicious book, likely to influence other people in some

undesirable way, then you will probably construct an aesthetic theory to

show that it has no merits. Current literary criticism consists quite

largely of this kind of dodging to and fro between two sets of

standards. And yet the opposite process can also happen: enjoyment can

overwhelm disapproval, even though one clearly recognizes that one is

enjoying something inimical. Swift, whose world-view is so peculiarly

unacceptable, but who is nevertheless an extremely popular writer, is a

good instance of this. Why is it that we don’t mind being called Yahoos,

although firmly convinced that we are not Yahoos?

It is not enough to make the usual answer that of course Swift was

wrong, in fact he was insane, but he was ‘a good writer’. It is true

that the literary quality of a book is to some small extent separable

from its subject-matter. Some people have a native gift for using words,

as some people have a naturally ‘good eye’ at games. It is largely a

question of timing and of instinctively knowing how much emphasis to

use. As an example near at hand, look back at the passage I quoted

earlier, starting ‘In the Kingdom of Tribnia, by the Natives called

Langdon’. It derives much of its force from the final sentence: ‘And

this is the anagram-made Method.’ Strictly speaking this sentence is

unnecessary, for we have already seen the anagram decyphered, but the

mock-solemn repetition, in which one seems to hear Swift’s own voice

uttering the words, drives home the idiocy of the activities described,

like the final tap to a nail. But not all the power and simplicity of

Swift’s prose, nor the imaginative effort that has been able to make not

one but a whole series of impossible worlds more credible than the

majority of history books — none of this would enable us to enjoy Swift

if his world-view were truly wounding or shocking. Millions of people,

in many countries, must have enjoyed Gulliver’s Travels while more or

less seeing its anti-human implications: and even the child who accepts

Parts i and n as a simple story gets a sense of absurdity from thinking

of human beings six inches high. The explanation must be that Swift’s

world-view is felt to be not altogether false — or it would probably be

more accurate to say, not false all the time. Swift is a diseased

writer. He remains permanently in a depressed mood which in most people

is only intermittent, rather as though someone suffering from jaundice

or the after-effects of influenza should have the energy to write books.

But we all know that mood, and something in us responds to the

expression of it. Take, for instance, one of his most characteristic

works, The Lady’s Dressing Room: one might add the kindred poem, Upon a

Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed. Which is truer, the viewpoint

expressed in these poems, or the viewpoint implied in Blake’s phrase,

‘The naked female human form divine’? No doubt Blake is nearer the

truth, and yet who can fail to feel a sort of pleasure in seeing that

fraud, feminine delicacy, exploded for once? Swift falsifies his picture

of the world by refusing to see anything in human life except dirt,

folly and wickedness, but the part which he abstracts from the whole

does exist, and it is something which we all know about while shrinking

from mentioning it. Part of our minds — in any normal person it is the

dominant part — believes that man is a noble animal and life is worth

living: but there is also a sort of inner self which at least

intermittently stands aghast at the horror of existence. In the queerest

way, pleasure and disgust are linked together. The human body is

beautiful: it is also repulsive and ridiculous, a fact which can be

verified at any swimming pool. The sexual organs are objects of desire

and also of loathing, so much so that in many languages, if not in all

languages, their names are used as words of abuse. Meat is delicious,

but a butcher’s shop makes one feel sick: and indeed all our food

springs ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things which of

all others seem to us the most horrible. A child, when it is past the

infantile stage but still looking at the world with fresh eyes, is moved

by horror almost as often as by wonder — horror of snot and spittle, of

the dogs’ excrement on the pavement, the dying toad full of maggots, the

sweaty smell of grown-ups, the hideousness of old men, with their bald

heads and bulbous noses. In his endless harping on disease, dirt and

deformity, Swift is not actually inventing anything, he is merely

leaving something out. Human behaviour, too, especially in politics, is

as he describes it, although it contains other more important factors

which he refuses to admit. So far as we can see, both horror and pain

are necessary to the continuance of life on this planet, and it is

therefore open to pessimists like Swift to say : ‘If horror and pain

must always be with us, how can life be significantly improved?’ His

attitude is in effect the Christian attitude, minus the bribe of a ‘next

world’ — which, however, probably has less hold upon the minds of

believers than the conviction that this world is a vale of tears and the

grave is a place of rest. It is, I am certain, a wrong attitude, and one

which could have harmful effects upon behaviour; but something in us

responds to it, as it responds to the gloomy words of the burial service

and the sweetish smell of corpses in a country church.

It is often argued, at least by people who admit the importance of

subject-matter, that a book cannot be ‘good’ if it expresses a palpably

false view of life. We are told that in our own age, for instance, any

book that has genuine literary merit will also be more or less

‘progressive’ in tendency. This ignores the fact that throughout history

a similar struggle between progress and reaction has been raging, and

that the best books of any one age have always been written from several

different viewpoints, some of them palpably more false than others. In

so far as a writer is a propagandist, the most one can ask of him is

that he shall genuinely believe in what he is saying, and that it shall

not be something blazingly silly. To-day, for example, one can imagine a

good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, pacifist,

an anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary

Conservative: one cannot imagine a good book being written by a

spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku-Klux-KIan. The views

that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical

sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask

of him is talent, which is probably another name for conviction. Swift

did not possess ordinary wisdom, but he did possess a terrible intensity

of vision, capable of picking out a single hidden truth and then

magnifying it and distorting it. The durability of Gulliver’s Travels

goes to show that, if the force of belief is behind it, a world-view

which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a

great work of art.

[1] Houyhnhnms too old to walk are described as being carried in

‘sledges’ or in ‘a kind of vehicle, drawn like a sledge’. Presumably

these had no wheels.

[2] The physical decadence which Swift claims to have observed may have

been a reality at that date. He attributes it to syphilis, which was a

new disease in Europe and may have been more virulent than it is now.

Distilled liquors, also, were a novelty in the seventeenth century and

must have led at first to a great increase in drunkenness.

[3] Tower.

[4] At the end of the book, as typical specimens of human folly and

viciousness, Swift names ‘a Lawyer, a Pickpocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a

Lord, a Gamester, a Politician, a Whore-master, a Physician, an

Evidence, a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traitor, or the like’. One sees

here the irresponsible violence of the powerless. The list lumps

together those who break the conventional code, and those who keep it.

For instance, if you automatically condemn a colonel, as such, on what

grounds do you condemn a traitor? Or again, if you want to suppress

pickpockets, you must have laws, which means that you must have lawyers.

But the whole closing passage, in which the hatred is so authentic, and

the reason given for it so inadequate, is somehow unconvincing. One has

the feeling that personal animosity is at work.